Sunday, January 3, 2016

I've had weeks messing around with the API, listening to the lectures, and reading the other blogs. First thing you notice... there's not a lot of detail, and not a lot of stories of people using it. I assume they're all quietly working hard.

And actually, there's a lot of blustery crap in blogs about how you can never possibly do real crypto in the browser. Because why? Um, because you can't trust the browser, that's why. I mean, sure, otherwise you have to trust the operating system, but that's completely different.

keys.publicKey //can be a publicKey or privateKey, as long as extractable was true

)

.then(function(keydata){

ident['public'] = keydata;

}),

]).then(function() {

return ident;

});

});

}

That code is complete, no library dependencies. You could cut-and-paste it into any script. What does it do? It generates an Elliptic Curve public/private keypair, serializes the keys, and returns the whole chunk of JSON-y goodness in a Promise.

It's the core operation to create a "cryptographic identity" for future operations like signatures or encryption or link security.

If you don't know about EC6 Promises that are now standard in all browsers, go read about that instead. Go, go! That's even more important!

So, what's the bad news? Well, Apple and Microsoft are being predictably slow in implementing the good and useful (the less kind would say the "not horribly broken and unsafe") algorithms that we badly need, such as the Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman (ECDH, use above) or Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) that are about 100 times faster, and yet 10 times more secure, than the previous generation of RSA-based algorithms.

You may have heard that everyone wants to deprecate SHA-1 as being utterly broken now. Guess which algorithm has near-universal support across all browsers?

There's a reason for this, and that reason is at the center of a large fight. The W3C crypto API does what the W3C usually does - it standardizes, but without mandating a standard. If that sounds odd, it's basically the process of writing down what everyone currently does (the "state of the art") and saying "It's ALL legal!".

I personally don't mind this approach. It recognizes the fact that you can't force the browser makers to do squat. No matter how many "thou shalls" you put in the spec, they won't if they don't want to. So they best you can do is get all the documentation out into the open.

After a couple of years, all the crap shakes itself off, and we get left with a minimal core of useful tools that actually achieve a purpose, and work in the real world. Then there's usually a V2 of the specification which normalizes that.

The browsers already have extensive crypto stacks, SSL layers, key vaults, etc. So the API makes it easy for the browsers to expose a lot of that existing machinery, even though most of it isn't that useful inside the sandbox. It's what they've got for now, and they get to show it off. That's why all the browsers offer SHA-1 despite it being horribly broken - 'cause it was already there.

With the Web Crypto API, that means 80% of the spec is dead and pointless on arrival, Old crap that should have been left to rot, but got dragged along because some company wanted the backwards compatibility with some obscure password system, and didn't want to spend time and money working on writing the good stuff.

The spec is almost unreadable, even for a W3C recommendation, and I've been doing this a while. hundreds of pages long, and it still excludes a lot of the important technical detail via references to IEEE documents.

But that's OK. This is Javascript. Just dance around the landmines, and you'll be fine.

The browser makers that don't come up to snuff fast enough, they'll just get a polyfill. Sure, their browsers still won't be 'secure', but they'll be able to talk to our browsers, which suddenly are. The weak links will get pressure applied until they crack.

To be honest. Microsoft Edge is looking pretty good here. For most of the new HTML5 features, I'm pretty impressed with The Edge, and I'm happy to put it close 3rd after tied Chrome and Mozilla, but clearly closing the gap. They don't have ECDH yet, but it smells like they're close... certain error messages have the feeling of "not implemented yet" rather than "Not a feature!", if you know what I mean. They're even talking about protecting CryptoKeys stored in indexedDB on Edge at the OS level, which is the sort of thing that shows real thoughtfulness.

Safari is becoming the great standards holdout, especially so on iOS. Which is a big shame, because most of these new technologies are especially useful on mobiles. The fact that you can generate a secure Elliptic Curve key in milliseconds, even on low-CPU mobiles, (rather than seconds for RSA) means they're more useful and save battery life. (And that's the last platform you want to polyfill math routines on.)

The lack of ECDH/DSA on iOS is probably the biggest thing holding back HTML5 apps from communicating securely with each other, as general practice. But Apple's walking a tightrope there... if HTML5 pages become too capable, (with offline storage and crypto and media systems) who will visit the App Store?

But I'm not worried. This standard is being implemented surprisingly quickly, and as I said, there's a core of about 20% of the API which does some wonderful, fantastic, critically important stuff that the web has been waiting for, for decades.

That's the reward for anyone willing to dive deep into the API. I'm sure over time, there'll be some handy jQuery functions that make it all easy. But remember, they named it "subtle" for a reason.